I must be getting wiser in my Medicare age. I used to feel compelled to finish virtually everything. I used to sit there watching movies that were boring me or annoying me or giving me no pleasure or escape. I used to at least try to eat everything on my plate in restaurants even if the food wasn’t especially good simply because I was paying for it. And I used to finish every book I bought – 100% of the time. I’m a writer. I felt it was a courtesy to my fellow authors to finish their work – the work I’m sure they’d labored over just as I labor over mine.

Not anymore. If I find myself saying, 50 pages into a book, “I’m not relating to these characters” or “This story is going nowhere” or “This writing leaves me cold,” I put the book down and move on to the next one in my queue. What a feeling of liberation!

Broadening this approach, I’ve also figured out that I don’t have to like everybody and everybody doesn’t have to like me – and I’m not talking about Facebook “likes.” I had a very disagreeable phone conversation with one of my new neighbors recently. At first her attitude stunned me. And then I said, “F*^k it.” I’m learning that even a pleaser like me doesn’t have to befriend everyone. Time is not to be wasted on people who are negative and, in the case of the neighbor, downright nasty. And friends who no longer behave like friends – people who aren’t supportive when things are going well or when they’re not – have no place in my life and it’s O.K. to let them go. I don’t love getting older, but I do love being able to say, as the writer Dominique Browning put it in her terrific piece in The New York Times, “I’m too old for this.” She was speaking primarily of our constant criticisms of our appearance, but the piece resonated with so many people that it was one of the top-viewed Op-Eds the week it ran. Here’s a look.

Fashion & Style | First Person
I’m Too Old for This

By DOMINIQUE BROWNING AUG. 8, 2015

There is a lot that is annoying, and even terrible, about aging. The creakiness of the body; the drifting of the memory; the reprising of personal history ad nauseam, with only yourself to listen.

But there is also something profoundly liberating about aging: an attitude, one that comes hard won. Only when you hit 60 can you begin to say, with great aplomb: “I’m too old for this.”

This line is about to become my personal mantra. I have been rehearsing it vigorously, amazed at how amply I now shrug off annoyances that once would have knocked me off my perch.

A younger woman advised me that “old” may be the wrong word, that I should consider I’m too wise for this, or too smart. But old is the word I want. I’ve earned it.

And let’s just start with being an older woman, shall we? Let others feel bad about their chicken wings — and their bottoms, their necks and their multitude of creases and wrinkles. I’m too old for this. I spent years, starting before I was a teenager, feeling insecure about my looks.

No feature was spared. My hairline: Why did I have to have a widow’s peak, at 10? My toes: too short. My entire body: too fat, and once, even, in the depths of heartbreak, much too thin. Nothing felt right. Well, O.K., I appreciated my ankles. But that’s about it.

What torture we inflict upon ourselves. If we don’t whip ourselves into loathing, then mean girls, hidden like trolls under every one of life’s bridges, will do it for us.

Even the vogue for strange-looking models is little comfort; those women look perfectly, beautifully strange, in a way that no one else does. Otherwise we would all be modeling.

One day recently I emptied out an old trunk. It had been locked for years; I had lost the key and forgotten what was in there. But, curiosity getting the best of me on a rainy afternoon, I managed to pry it open with a screwdriver.

It was full of photographs. There I was, ages 4 to 40. And I saw for the first time that even when I was in the depths of despair about my looks, I had been beautiful.

And there were all my friends; girls and women with whom I had commiserated countless times about hair, weight, all of it, doling out sympathy and praise, just as I expected it heaped upon me: beautiful, too. We were, we are, all beautiful. Just like our mothers told us, or should have. (Ahem.)

Those smiles, radiant with youth, twinkled out of the past, reminding me of the smiles I know today, radiant with strength.

Young(er) women, take this to heart: Why waste time and energy on insecurity? I have no doubt that when I’m 80 I’ll look at pictures of myself when I was 60 and think how young I was then, how filled with joy and beauty.

I’m happy to have a body that is healthy, that gets me where I want to go, that maybe sags and complains, but hangs in there. So maybe I’m too old for skintight jeans, too old for six-inch stilettos, too old for tattoos and too old for green hair.

Weight gain? Simply move to the looser end of the wardrobe, and stop hanging with Ben and Jerry. No big deal. Nothing to lose sleep over. Anyway, I’m too old for sleep, or so it seems most nights.

Which leaves me a bit cranky in the daytime, so it is a good thing I can now work from home. Office politics? Sexism? I’ve seen it all. Watching men make more money, doing less work. Reading the tea leaves as positions shuffle, listening to the kowtow and mumble of stifled resentment.

I want to tell my younger colleagues that it doesn’t matter. Except the sexism, which, like poison ivy, is deep-rooted: You weed the rampant stuff, but it pops up again.

What matters most is the work. Does it give you pleasure, or hope? Does it sustain your soul? My work as a climate activist is the hardest and most fascinating I’ve ever done. I’m too old for the dark forces, for hopelessness and despair. If everyone just kept their eyes on the ball, and followed through each swing, we’d all be more productive, and not just on the golf course.

The key to life is resilience, and I’m old enough to make such a bald statement. We will always be knocked down. It’s the getting up that counts. By the time you reach upper middle age, you have started over, and over again.

And, I might add, resilience is the key to feeling 15 again. Which is actually how I feel most of the time.

But I am too old to try to change people. By now I’ve learned, the very hard way, that what you see in someone at the beginning is what you get forevermore. Most of us are receptive to a bit of behavior modification. But through decades of listening to people complain about marriages or lovers, I hear the same refrains.

I have come to realize that there is comfort in the predictability, even the ritualization, of relationship problems. They become a dance step; each partner can twirl through familiar moves, and do-si-do until the music stops.

Toxic people? Sour, spoiled people? I’m simply walking away; I have little fight left in me. It’s easier all around to accept that friendships have ebbs and flows, and indeed, there’s something quite beautiful about the organic nature of love.

I used to think that one didn’t make friends as one got older, but I’ve learned that the opposite happens. Sometimes, unaccountably, a new person walks into your life, and you find you are never too old to love again. And again. (See resilience.)

One is never too old for desire. Having entered the twilight of my dating years, I can tell you it is much easier to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of anticipation and disappointment when you’ve had plenty of experience with the shoals and eddies of shallow waters. Emphasis on shallow. By now, we know deep.

Take a pass on bad manners, on thoughtlessness, on unreliability, on carelessness and on all the other ways people distinguish themselves as unappealing specimens. Take a pass on your own unappealing behavior, too: the pining, yearning, longing and otherwise frittering away of valuable brainwaves that could be spent on Sudoku, or at least a jigsaw puzzle, if not that Beethoven sonata you loved so well in college.

My new mantra is liberating. At least once a week I encounter a situation that in the old (young) days would have knocked me to my knees or otherwise spun my life off center.

Now I can spot trouble 10 feet away (believe me, this is a big improvement), and I can say to myself: Too old for this. I spare myself a great deal of suffering, and as we all know, there is plenty of that to be had without looking for more.

If there can be such a thing as a best-selling app like Yo, which satisfies so many urges to boldly announce ourselves, I want one called 2old4this. A signature kiss-off to all that was once vexatious. A goodbye to all that has done nothing but hold us back. That would be an app worth having. But, thankfully, I’m too old to need such a thing.

I met Pam Burke years ago during my New York publishing days. She co-executive produced NBC’s “Tomorrow” show with Tom Snyder, and as a book publicist I’d pitch her my authors for the show. Later, after I left publishing and before I started writing my own books, she and I worked together on the short-lived “USA Today: The Television Show.” She’s always been a doer and a whip-smart one at that. Her latest media venture is The Women’s Eye, a multifaceted web enterprise that includes radio, feature stories, interviews and just about every sort of news-you-can-use for women.

Now TWE has decided to launch their first-ever “tel-event” or “webinar” (choose your favorite term) on May 29th at 10am PT and I’m their guest speaker.

I’ll be interviewed by TWE’s fabulous Stacey Gualandi….

She’ll ask me questions about caregiving and my survival guide, You’d Better Not Die or I’ll Kill You, and everyone who signs up for this FREE event will be able to ask me questions too. See their invitation page below and please register, share with others, spread the word. I’m really excited about this as soooo many people I know are dealing with a parent or grandparent, sibling, spouse or friend with an illness and they’re feeling overwhelmed. We’ll cover how to be the best patient advocate while still taking care of your own health and sanity. And, as I said, it’s FREE. Not a bad deal at all! Just go to the TWE page and follow the links to register. See you there.

TWE TelEvent: LIVE Q&A With Jane Heller-Essential Tips for Caregivers

Yes, it’s our FIRST EVENT and we wanted to invite you… Join us via the Web, your phone, or Skype 10 AM Pacific Time Thursday, May 29th for a FREE, LIVE Interview and Q&A session with:New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and long-time caregiver JANE HELLER

How to Be the Best Caregiver and Still Take Care of You

TWE Radio host, Stacey Gualandi, will be interviewing Jane, the author of her Caregiver’s Survival Guide, You’d Better Not Die or I’ll Kill You, (what she says to her husband Michael before he goes into surgery). Then we’ll open it up for your questions.

Jane’s written 13 romantic comedies, so you know she’s got a great sense of humor, but she was also catapulted into the world of caregiving when she met and married her husband, who has had more than thirty surgeries for Crohn’s Disease.

In this webinar, Jane will share her tips about: How to Be the Best Patient Advocate for Your Loved One How to Keep Your Sanity How to Maintain Your Health

See Jane’s terrific book trailer on this page along with all of the details for this event including: How to join us by the Web, your phone, or Skype How the teleconference works (it’s simple!) How you can ask your questions ahead of time as well as during the event How to register for the replay in case you can’t make the live event If you want to Register Now, just click the button! Click to Register Warm regards, Pam, Cheryl and The Women’s Eye Team P.S. Please pass this on to others you think would like to attend.

This is sort of a sad post. Just warning you. Well, not sad exactly. Just bittersweet.

Over the years, lots of readers have written to me telling me how much they’ve enjoyed my books. They’ve been mostly women, and they’ve had straightforward names like Linda and Cindy as well as lighthearted email handles like cupcake4you and queenoflaughter. Many asked if I would send out an e-newsletter to keep them informed of my writing projects. As a result, I kept a list of their email addresses on the off-chance that I might actually produce a “Hi, here’s what’s new” notification at some point.

Now that this Mainly Jane blog is up and running and the web site has been all dressed up, I thought, Why not send everybody that “Hi, here’s what’s new” email after all.

At first I worried that the sheer volume of the outgoing mail would cause my server to shut me down for conducting a spam operation. But then came the bounce-backs. You know the ones. They say “Undeliverable.” And “Returned Mail.” And – this is the cruelest cut of all – “Failure.”

Not every email came back, but quite a few of them did, and the whole exercise reminded me that people’s lives change. I mean, really change. They graduate from college, move to another house or another part of the country, get married and/or divorced, lose their jobs and/or find new ones. And some die.

Whatever happened to that nice woman named Donna who used to write to me so often? And how about Samantha, who had broken her leg and asked her mother to set her up in bed with a bunch of my books? And what about Ronni, who liked to confide in me, a perfect stranger, about her troubles and tell me how my stories cheered her up? Where did they all go while I was so busy leading my own life?

I’ll never know. But I began the task tonight of deleting the no-longer-viable names and addresses from the Word document that’s been sitting in my computer for the longest time. Wherever they are, I hope my old friends have a book in their hands (or on their Kindle). That’s one thing I do know about them: they love to read.

Since writing is such a sedentary affair, I really try to get out of the house in the late afternoons and walk a few miles. It’s not exactly a hardship since I live in paradise, with the ocean to my south and the mountains to the north – a gorgeous eyeful wherever I look. The rest of the country is in a deep freeze, but it’s been in the ’70s here in Santa Barbara. (I know, I know. I’m very lucky.)

I don’t belong to a gym, don’t do Pilates or yoga, don’t even wiggle a Hula Hoop around my hips. My only concession to “organized exercise” is the Tracy Anderson DVD I pop in the machine when I’m in the mood to be sore the next morning.

(courtesy mothertalkers.com)

My usual walk involves me and my iPod. I walk at a fast clip, music turned up loud – something up-tempo that inspires me to keep moving. (I don’t mind admitting that I am not a snob when it comes to disco. I love it, especially for walking and, of course, dancing.) Anyhow, it’s when I walk that I try to review what I wrote earlier in the day. I get fresh ideas. I think of how to revise and edit. I clear my head.

Today I deviated from my solitary routine by walking with an actual person: my friend Gale Goldberg, a freelance architect with many varied clients. As we kept pace with each other, she described her recent trip to San Francisco where she consulted on a residential project and enjoyed the interaction with the homeowners.

“I spent most of the time listening to them,” she said. “I let them do the talking and just took in what their needs were. And only after they were done did I figure out how to design their house, which is why I call myself an ‘archiatrist.'”

“A what?” I asked.

“A combination architect and psychiatrist,” she clarified. “I’ve had many mental health professionals for whom I’ve done freelance work and they pass my name along within their circles. Over the years I’ve found that good listening skills and translation into problem-solving solutions are essential for successful projects.”

We continued our walk – I think we did a good five miles – but it wasn’t until I got home that I realized how much writers and architects have in common. We both need to listen and observe. We both need to get a sense of what makes people tick. We both need to take what we’ve learned and create something that wasn’t there before.

Some of my best ideas for books have evolved from simply listening to and observing others. Today’s walk with Gale reminded me of that.